Imagine the unimaginable

Thursday marks the fourth anniversary of Black Saturday, Australia's worst natural disaster in a century. In the weeks and months following the event, Victoria's forensic detectives made incredible efforts to identify the dead.

Kevin Childs

'YOU could hear the panic in my staff member's voice,'' says mortuary manager Jodie Leditschke, remembering the first phone calls warning of a deluge of bodies. It is Saturday, February 7, 2009, and Melbourne's mortuary at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine is already full because of 450 unexpected deaths, mainly elderly and vulnerable people, attributed to the recent heatwave.

After a fortnight when temperatures averaged 35 degrees, the mercury today hits a record 46.4 degrees, made more frightening by gale-force winds.

In the afternoon, news of the bushfires in towns to the north and east of the city reaches the institute, and forensic pathologists ponder the scale of the job ahead. It's their responsibility to investigate and report the cause of unexpected or suspicious deaths to the Coroner - a profession made familiar by TV crime dramas such as Silent Witness.

Told that the fires have been deadly, the few staff on duty work overnight to finish reports on the heatwave victims, in order to release their bodies and make more space.

Naming the dead is routine for these medical detectives, but none could anticipate the horror and complexity of the task that would consume them for the next three months.

LEDITSCHKE, who holds a PhD in forensic medicine, is the first to attempt to take stock of the situation. In the institute's low-slung grey building, a punt kick from the ABC's Southbank studios, she makes calls and directs staff like a triage nurse. She is reassuring, warm and efficient, according to colleagues.

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Not all her staff, which usually number between 8 and 10, are on deck - some are overseas, others are simply enjoying their weekend.

Among those away is Richard Bassed, a dental expert or forensic odontologist, who has taken his three young children to visit his parents' sheep and wheat farm near the town of Colbinabbin, near the NSW border.

At about 7pm, Bassed gets a call from the institute. Ten people are dead, he is told, and he is needed.

Driving home with his children the next morning, he can hardly see the road for smoke by the time the freeway passes Kilmore, just north of Melbourne's fringes. Dropping off the kids, he heads to the Southbank room that will become his virtual home for the next three months and begins calling other dentists and organising the examination area.

Early the same morning, Leditschke briefs the Coroner, Judge Jennifer Coate, on the likely number of dead from the heatwave and fires.

The atmosphere, already, is one of disbelief. The fires are known to have killed at least 40 people. On a normal week, the mortuary holds 80 bodies, and can take up to about 120. Judge Coate says: ''We need to build more storage.''

On Monday morning, senior staff meet to complete plans. By the afternoon, the official death toll is between 70 and 80, but planning is now based on it reaching 300. (Of the 300 people reported missing by relatives and friends, just under half survive.)

Leditschke hires marquees, similar to those used at the races. A food and rest tent goes up. Events companies, with experience in quickly assembling venues, raise the marquees and a tent tunnel from the main mortuary to the temporary storage area in the carpark. Six 13-metre refrigerated containers for storing bodies are ordered.

Easy access to power is critical. Water is needed, too. Electricians, plumbers and carpenters, experienced at the institute, come in. By Monday night, they have finished. The temporary mortuary is set up, surrounded by a security fence to keep out the curious and the media.

By Tuesday, bodies start arriving. Each is given a barcode, photographed and registered in the computer. Care is taken to tag asbestos debris with a pink bag label.

Masked and gowned teams of pathologists, dental experts, anthropologists, police and mortuary assistants wipe their feet on a sticky mat as they enter a room of pipettes, benders and other instruments. Fresh air helps prevent contamination.

There are four phases of identification: first, the recovery of a body, then a post-mortem, in which the cause of death, and if possible, an identity, is established.

Phase three is ''ante mortem'', in which checks are made for fingerprints, DNA, dental or medical records. How tall was a person, what were they wearing, did they have tattoos or piercings?

Using a system developed by Interpol, the investigators write on pink forms everything known about a person. All the details found in phase three go on yellow forms. Phase four is the reconciliation of the two coloured forms to get a scientifically robust identification.

The teams stop for breaks of 10 to 15 minutes. Sandwiches, fruit and drinks arrive as they work through the weekend for the first two months.

The investigators aim to be detached and professional, and try not to allow their emotions to affect their work. They avoid the news, although inevitably the face of a person they may have helped identify pops up on TV.

''You remove yourself,'' says DNA expert Dadna Hartman, 45.

Staff numbers at the mortuary grow to 200, with experts arriving from across Australia and abroad, including photographers, fingerprint experts, note-takers and exhibits officers.

Leditschke, 45, is hard at it each day from 5.30am to 9pm. By Thursday, she is exhausted. ''You know it's going to end,'' she says, ''but you know that you have to put in the hours.''

In a lino-floored room resembling a big operating theatre, dentists work in pairs at silver trolleys. Institute director and forensic pathologist Stephen Cordner recalls a calm, professional atmosphere.

(Cordner, 60, is an earnest man whose rumpled appearance shows his dedication to the job. His family is such a part of the Melbourne Football Club, their name is on an entrance to the MCG.)

More help arrives as the week progresses. Cordner's opposite numbers fly in from Sydney and Perth. Keeping track of the many staff and volunteers, their travel, accommodation and supplies becomes a burden.

On Friday, six days after Black Saturday, forensic anthropologist Soren Blau, 41, who had been working in the Himalayas teaching Nepalese about disaster identification, returns to Melbourne. Forensic odontologist Tony Hill takes a little longer in returning from Nepal, where he watched the fires on TV news.

Back in Melbourne, they slot in with ease. To Blau, who first worked on human remains on a dig in Israel, the process is the same whether remains are 3000 years old or six days. She is among those chosen by Leditschke to join police at fire scenes in the search for bodies.

It is now 11 days since the fires, and some roads are still blocked, so Blau flies by helicopter to Marysville. Through the enveloping smoke she spots a brightly coloured home, a lone survivor. To colleagues, she can seem intense and detached, yet images such as this will cling to her memory.

In the town, she remembers seeing a child's plastic swing, undamaged, while all around is gone.

Blau works to establish victims' ancestry, sex and age, taking note of any bones that have healed or that show signs of age. Each day she joins the others - DNA experts, pathologists, odontologists, mortuary technicians and police. Sitting in the high-backed blue swivel chairs in a conference room, each report helps to piece together positive IDs.

Other forensic anthropologists from the institute also go to the fire scenes, and are shocked by what they see. Teams check 1800 dwellings and 760 burnt-out vehicles, and see destruction almost complete.

Chris Briggs, 62, who saw the aftermath of the Bali bombing, the Christchurch earthquake and East Timor killings, compares what he sees at Strathewen, Strath Creek and Myrtleford with unforgettable images of the nuclear wipeout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Back at Southbank, the bustling Tony Hill takes over from Bassed as co-ordinator of the dental team, about 40 people strong, which will eventually identify about 60 per cent of the victims. They use techniques that enable them to accurately assess ages from birth to about 20.

Hill, who sits in a cramped cubicle, adorned with a plastic model of a skull, says people's back teeth are protected from trauma and incineration by dense bone and cheek muscles.

Police evidence about victims' residences helps consolidate evidence, says Hill. In one case, the crowned tooth of a 45-year-old man leads to his identification from dental records.

Throughout the first week, rumours about the number of victims swirl like bushfire smoke (such as the claim of ''300 dead at Seymour'').

Teams of police forensic experts, pathologists, dental experts and archeologists head for country towns whose names become morbidly familiar: Narbethong and Flowerdale that, like Kinglake, Marysville and Strathewen, were almost wiped out, and the badly hit Steeles Creek, Humevale, Clonbinane, Wandong, St Andrews and Taggerty. All bushfire victims are taken to the institute, which reports to the State Coroner on all unexpected or suspicious deaths.

The enormity of the fires, the 145 different scenes, blocked roads and the danger of falling trees, power lines and flare-ups make a final body count impossible, even into the second week.

Amid the institute's extraordinary new routine, ordinary deaths continue across the state. Work goes on to confirm the cause of death of accident victims and unusual fatalities. The public is patient, despite delays in bodies being released for burial. ''I know you are really busy, but … '' is how many phone conversations begin.

At the bushfire scenes and at the institute, the tiniest of fragments of the dead are identified with due dignity. The mammoth task of identification is made easier by a $30,000 robot, 1.5 metres tall, donated by a company to help identify the bushfire victims. It performs the necessary but wearisome work of dipping instruments into vial after vial to test DNA.

While teeth often provide the best clues in disasters such as fire - because they are the strongest part the body and the last to disintegrate - DNA identification is faster and more reliable. Where DNA samples are available, computer software, of the kind seen on crime thrillers such as CSI, helps accelerate the process.

Using 12 extra computers and a software program developed by the FBI, Dadna Hartman, head of molecular biology, and her team build genetic ''pedigrees'' to positively identify 50 people.

DNA is identified by using swabs from surviving siblings or grandparents, and then comparing the genetic data with remains such as blood, bone or tissue, creating a probability ratio to link a victim with family.

''Guthrie cards'', containing blood samples of people born in Victoria after 1970, also help. (Babies have a pin-prick blood test at birth to check for genetic disorders, and the dried blood spot containing DNA is stored on a card at the Royal Children's Hospital along with their names and their mothers' name.) Although there is a delay in deciding who can requisition the Guthrie cards, checking against them throws up about a dozen bushfire victims' names.

Over the next three months, the number of identifications Hartman works on is the same as the previous year's total. Known as maternal yet highly professional, she worries her colleagues because of the effect the mammoth job is having on her.

''We'll be right,'' she says to those who ask how she is coping. (As we talk three years later, she uses the term ''horrible'' several times in describing the experience.)

Some identifications, of victims not badly burned, are easy. Others are difficult, although sometimes the process is made easier by CT scans, which pick up wallets, jewellery, watches, fillings, Pacemakers and numbered titanium hips in the remains.

ON APRIL 7, three months to the day after Black Saturday, the final identifications are handed to the Coroner. Of the 173 victims, only one is not scientifically identified. This toll makes Black Saturday the greatest Australian natural disaster in more than a century - if the preceding heatwave's 450 dead are excluded. The toll is exceeded only by the Cape York cyclone of 1899, when more than 400 people died.

Nine Black Saturday victims died in hospital in the weeks after the fire and did not need to be identified. Another 24 burns victims were admitted to hospital, while 295 were treated and discharged.

The experience will never be forgotten. Cordner says one of the lessons was the importance of looking after all staff - not only those directly involved in responding to the disaster.

''This includes proper rest and breaks and proper time for de-briefing,'' he says, adding ''no communication is too much with partners and collaborating institutions.''

Another flow-on from the institute's work on bushfire victims is that it now holds Australia's first missing persons DNA data base, a significant step in working on cold cases of people missing for at least 10 years.

The institute also collaborated last May on a disaster-response exercise, called Operation Hades.

Run by police under the framework of national counter-terrorism, the exercise dealt with an imaginary poisonous gas attack at Tullamarine Airport, in which an unknown chemical killed people on a flight from Darwin to Melbourne.

A temporary mortuary was set up by the institute with forensic pathologists, mortuary technicians, odontologists and IT staff working through emergency processes, together with other services including the police, ambulance officers and firefighters.

As ghoulish as such an exercise might seem, imagining the unimaginable is a legacy of Black Saturday. As a consequence of their work in Operation Hades, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade said it could lend the institute its portable field hospital, the size of a suburban home and air-conditioned, should it be available and the mortuary be overwhelmed again.

The thought of such a need has never been far away for the institute's staff this summer. At his home one scorching day recently, Richard Bassed glances at the TV to check the forecast while nursing his infant son. ''It's days like today,'' he says, ''that make you think twice about everybody.''